Pinterest interview questions

Tell me about a time where you failed to deliver a project on time

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Meta, Toast

Last reported Jun 2026

Tell me about a time where you mentored a colleague

Companies: Pinterest, Bloomberg, Confluent, Google +9

Last reported Jun 2026

Tell me about a time you worked on a complex cross-functional project and had to leverage your relationships to ensure its success

Companies: Pinterest, CrowdStrike, Meta, Monzo +3

Last reported Jun 2026

Tell me how you helped someone in your team to get better at some task

Companies: Pinterest, Coinbase, Google, Meta +1

Last reported Jun 2026

Escape Room Leaderboard

Given a list of escape room participants and their completion times, implement a leaderboard system that ranks players based on their performance. The solution should…

Companies: Pinterest

Last reported Jun 2026

Coin Change II

Given unlimited coins of specified denominations, count how many distinct combinations (order irrelevant) sum to a target amount. This is a classic unbounded knapsack /…

Companies: Pinterest

Last reported Mar 2026

Design Log Storage System

Design a data structure to store log entries by id with timestamps and support put(id, timestamp) and retrieve(start, end, granularity) returning all ids whose timestamps…

Companies: Pinterest, CrowdStrike

Last reported Mar 2026

Design Search Autocomplete System

Design an online autocomplete system that processes characters one-by-one, returning the top 3 historically most frequent sentences that match the current prefix (ranked by…

Companies: Pinterest, Google, Netflix, Vercel

Data Stream · Depth-First Search · Design · Heap (Priority Queue)

Last reported Mar 2026

Design a backfill framework

Design a backfill framework that can efficiently retrieve and populate historical data for users from external APIs, handling data synchronization and error recovery.

Companies: Pinterest

Last reported Jan 2026

Design Pin recommendation system

Companies: Pinterest

ML System Design · Recommendation Systems

Last reported Jul 2025

Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker. How did you resolve it?

Companies: Pinterest, Adyen, Airbnb, Amazon +31

Last reported Jul 2025

Delete Node in a BST

Delete the node with a given key from a BST while preserving BST order: search down O(height) to find the node and then handle the…

Companies: Pinterest, LinkedIn

Last reported May 2025

Describe a challenging situation where a project or initiative under your leadership wasn't going as planned and how you persevered to overcome the situation.

Companies: Pinterest, Anthropic, CrowdStrike, Google +1

Last reported Apr 2025

Design Dropbox or Google Drive

Large file transfers with small metadata transactions: resumable uploads, offline conflicts, reliable change feeds, and shared subtrees whose permissions change as files move.

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Apple, Autodesk +17

access-control · change-data-capture · conflict-resolution · data-versioning

Last reported Apr 2025

Add Two Numbers II

Companies: Pinterest, Meta

Linked List · Math · Stack

Bias-Variance Tradeoff and Vanishing Gradients in Feedforward Networks

Companies: Pinterest

ML Fundamentals · Neural Networks & Training

Compute Recall and FPR from Confusion Matrices to Select Classifiers

Companies: Pinterest

Model Evaluation

Design a top K trending system

Continuously changing rankings: sliding-window expiration, exact distributed top K, viral articles, and share-ID deduplication across delivery and replay.

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Bloomberg, LinkedIn +2

deduplication · distributed-top-k · event-time · hot-keys

Design an ads serving system

Fast ad selection over changing campaign data, with strict budget enforcement despite concurrent serving and delayed impression events.

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Google, Meta

budget-enforcement · cache-invalidation · event-streaming · idempotency

Ensemble Learning Trade-offs and Why Bagging Reduces Overfitting

Companies: Pinterest

ML Fundamentals · Supervised Learning

Explain bias–variance, overfitting, and vanishing gradients

Companies: Pinterest

ML Fundamentals · Neural Networks & Training

Explain overfitting, underfitting, and regularization

Companies: Pinterest

ML Fundamentals